Dan McCarney: Devin Thomas fallout

It’s Sunday, and I’ve been able to track down more details on the severity of the ankle injury suffered by Madison star Devin Thomas late in the Mavericks 42-14 victory over Reagan.

Thomas suffered a broken ankle on the last of his 30 carries and will be out for the season. Surgery had been planned for early Sunday afternoon at Unversity Hospital, but an examination revealed that Thomas had suffered no major structural damage. He will spend the next six to eight weeks in a cast, Thomas’ father, Willie said, before beginning rehabilitation in February.

Judging by the e-mails that are starting to filter in, and the comments we heard in the press box Saturday night, the biggest question besides Thomas’ health is exactly what he was still doing on the field with four minutes and change left in a blowout victory? He already had 300-plus yards. The game was won. Did he need to be out there?

My immediate thought was no. But after talking with Madison coach Jim Streety on the phone this morning, consider the scenario — the Mavericks started that last drive with more than nine minutes left in the fourth quarter. Even with a 21-point lead, they were trying to use their workhorse to kill the game. Because after watching Reagan score 17 points in the final 10 minutes of last year’s game, Streety wasn’t about to take any chances.

Because when you’re dealing with teenage boys, you never know what’s going to happen.

Beyond that, even if you don’t get into the strategic aspects, the odds that Thomas was going to suffer such a major injury at that juncture are so slim, so inconsequential, that they’re almost not even worth thinking about. Up to that point, he’d carried the ball exactly 330 times in his varsity career, with the most serious damage being a sprained ankle and a collection of bruises. What were the chances that No. 331 was going to be any different? Next to zero.

It’s the same reason why Peyton Manning, arguably the best and most valuable football player on the planet, has played multiple NFL seasons without missing a single snap. It’s the same reason countless other coaches, in countless other games, do the same thing Streety did and leave their star players in a few snaps longer than they probably should.

Even in a sport as brutal and unforgiving as football, injuries like the one we saw on Saturday are still so rare, you simply can’t predict or prepare for them. And that that’s why I refuse to brand this as a coaching bungle rather than a case of horribly bad luck.